The sky above New Taipei City’s (新北市) Baishawan (白沙灣) was brightened by kites of all shapes and colors last weekend as more than 60,000 visitors thronged to the beach to enjoy the sun, ocean and the New Taipei City North Coast International Kite Festival.
According to the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, the organizer of the event, the two-day festival featured 150 kite enthusiasts from countries including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Portugal, Sweden, New Zealand and Malaysia.
Scores of multicolored kites were flown on Saturday to mark the opening of the festival, including rainbow-colored kites in the shape of roller blades and an octopus by New Zealand kite designer Peter Lynn.
Photo: CNA, courtesy of the New Taipei City Government
There was also a kite depicting a bottle of vodka by Swedish kite flyer Andreas Agren.
New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) and several other local politicians attended the event’s opening ceremony, which culminated with a “kite puppet show,” in which two kites depicting Shih Yan-wen (史豔文) and Tsang Ching-jen (藏鏡人), two of the most famous characters created by traditional glove puppet artist Huang Chun-hsiung (黃俊雄), “engaged in a martial arts contest” in the air.
To go with this year’s theme — “Finding Real Happiness” — the organizers customized a pink-colored kite for a young man who got down on one knee at the festival on Saturday to propose to his girlfriend of 12 years.
Other highlights included a number of giant ladybug sculptures that were installed all over the beach, which came in several colors including orange, pink, blue and green.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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